


i’ll fake god today

by ruruka



Category: The Ren & Stimpy Show
Genre: M/M, also this isn’t mpreg or genderbend or whatever stimpy is just trans., mentions of abuse and drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27418183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: ren struggles with the concept of fatherhood.
Relationships: Stimpson "Stimpy" J. Cat/Ren Höek
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	i’ll fake god today

When the chips are down, Ren prays.

It’s impulse. A well trained therapist would tell him that atheism is a symptom of his upbringing, and he isn’t wrong for not believing in whatever god he’s begging for another mile on empty, or that the Yankees hit a foul; a better psychiatrist would throw him an antipsychotic.

(All the professionals in the world can’t quite put their finger on his subconscious desire to fix things through prayer, yes, like his father taught him, all those years of being yanked at the wrist to kneel and beg forgiveness, yeah, when things go wrong, God can make them right).

Sometimes he prays for bigger things, like kneeling at the bedside to ask for pectoral muscles, like when the latch on the front door clicks in nighttime wind, like to keep the card from declining at the grocery checkout, like sleep, like money, like stability, like when his boyfriend misses his third period consecutive and Ren prays right there hand to God that middle school health class is the one in the wrong, not him.

Ren prays a lot in the next months that follow, and sometimes, he even thinks. In the shower, it’s hot enough to burn right through to the bone, it’s soap tickling the fine hairs of his chest, a headache that hasn’t left him for three days begging his temples’ attention, steam and wit and skin. That’s where Ren thinks the most. His first shower is bloody. In his first shower, he picks chipped fingernails at the carpets of his brain, picks and picks and peels and picks til they come right up and show how nice the hardwood used to be, but it’s a massacre nonetheless, guts on the shower wall and the curtains flecked in black. He thinks about, on one hand, how much abortions cost, yet on the other the _astronomical_ difference between the six hundred bucks for a doctor to stick a coat hanger up there, and the six hundred thousand that a baby costs to maintain. Per day. He steps out of that shower and grinds his feet on the dirty towel that protects the dirty floor, spits in the mirror once it unfogs enough to find his ragged, sleepless face within.

In his second shower, something like a week later on, he thinks, _fuck,_ they’ve got to get married. Fast. He wonders why yet they haven’t. Bigotry. Drive to the town hall’s a quarter tank of gas. Fear. Dress shoes remind him of Sundays at church. Ambivalence. 

2003 brings him lots of wonderful things. He likes that new OutKast song that’s always on the radio. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake isn’t awful. One morning he finds thirteen dimes between the couch cushions, which is to him both a funny little omen and enough for a 7-Eleven taquito. His favorite chinos fit again after stress eating two inches onto his waist, the summer’s not too hot, the squirrels in the attic rehome themselves, and _oh, yeah,_ that winter finds him clutching breathlessly the warmth of his firstborn son.

Everything is quiet after Ricky is born. Ren doesn’t think anymore, but he does pray. He looks at his son lain out in the crib he’d hammered together himself with just exactly a week to spare, he looks at his son and prays for time to stop. If there is no time, there is no chance. No chance the ceiling tiles weakened from years of dripping rain could fall and crush so delicate a skull as can fit in his very palm, oh dear _God,_ there’s no chance his own hands could be responsible for turning fate, a quick jerk to break the most fragile neck he’s ever felt, a single step dropped too heavy and too blind beneath him, oh, dear God, might You turn it quelled? 

Thoughts like that are why he no longer thinks. He watches, instead, sits in his armchair and watches Stimpy do what need be done. Neither of them sleep anymore, but for Ren that’s nothing new, and for Stimpy it’s no change in his natural vigor other than the every so often collapse of exhaustion before he’s up and at ‘em again at the very next sound of a cry. Stimpy’s a good father. Ren’s a...father. 

And thoughts like _that_ are where it all sort of hits him, sitting in his armchair, pulse calmed by lamp light. He’s a father. His eyes blink slowly at first, pushing further from their sockets each go. His chin lifts from where it rests on a hand. He’s got a kid. A fully formed six day old goddamn child that relies on him every waking moment. Ren is a father. 

The burn starts on his tongue, and he’s hunched over the kitchen sink retching up nothing before he even realizes he’s moving. He spits in the sink, great big _pchew ptchews_ that feel almost performative, only silenced once he’s resigned himself to the lack of doting hands on his shoulders and rescue come to find him. A quivering elbow pushes him up. With ears low he stares from the skinny little kitchen to the dark hush of the rest of the apartment; he’s smaller the longer he’s alone here, not a footstep fallen elsewhere to tug him back to life here, no. Ren is as small gripping the sink in shaking hands as he was as a child, a trembling mess of adolescence watching his father pick up another plate and whip it to their nice white tile. 

“You don’t want to wash the dishes,” said the Reverend Höek without lifting his wet teeth from each other, got right home from the church to find the sink still full and that’s where Ren got his shoulders gripped up and pulled to watch him fix it. “Then we don’t need dishes.”

A clear glass shattered on the kitchen floor. His father’s big black boots crushed the shards like nothing at all when he stepped to grab a mug and its tea stained inside, cast it on the floor, pick up the plate his mother eats her Christmas dinner off of, splintered it across the tile and left Ren flinching.

“I’m not doing this to punish you, Ren,” his father said far too calmly, and Ren knows they both were standing there but felt it more like he were on his own shoulders the second his father said his name that way. Between their feet a sheugh of porcelain separated them. Ren looked to the glass, looked to his father, the way his mouth licked around the delirium of his own procured delusions. “This isn’t about you. It isn’t even about me. The dishes were a boundary between us. By breaking them, I’m getting through to you. The dishes were a boundary.”

Ren remembers blinking back the burn in his eyes. Ren remembers- 

“Hey, uh, are you okay?” 

When he flinches, it’s not because he’s been touched but because he’s been touched. There’s a hand on his back, a soft one that cares for him in every gentle rub down and up his trembling spine, and just beside him in the dark of their kitchen is Stimpy and all the concern in his exhausted yellow cat eyes. “I could hear you hwarfing, do you need a tummy rub?”

Ren breathes through his nose, anchors himself back in real life with a flick of his wrist to wipe the drool from his chin. “No, ah, that’s alright.” He’s never heard his voice so low, but it’s true that everything is quiet after their son is born, five little quivering pounds of Chihuahua puppy that pulls their voices to a hush neither knew they could be capable of. “Open a beer for me, huh?”

Grin loyal, Stimpy sticks himself to the wall and rolls his way round the bend til Ren hears the refrigerator suction itself open. The exhale’s heavy when out it rattles from both lungs.

Maybe he starts thinking again around the time Ricky learns to hold his own head up. He thinks he’s used to insomnia, but his eyelid’s never twitched quite this much. He thinks his throat is tighter than last he’d checked. He thinks he won’t ever make his son do the dishes. 

His son. Ah. His son. It’s had to have been- his face clenches behind a hand -it’s had to have been two months now, that’s right. He’s been a father for two months and doesn’t know his son’s eye color. And the tennis match begins again- one side that tells him he ought to keep his unjust hands off such untrodden flesh and blood, and the second side of the opinion that he deserves a kick in the ass for living on the sidelines this long. But the more he tries to force it, the more his brain convulses with its own dirty ideas. He’ll stand and find his way behind the little creak of the bedroom door breathing as he slips inside. The crib rail will be cold on his hand but the blankets warmed inside it, and it’ll always be something like eleven in the morning or eight:sixteen at night when he stands there and looks down at him, his _baby,_ the very second thing ever in his life that’s stabbed into him such a ferocious instinct to protect, and times like those Ren gets so far as reaching his hands down into the crib before his focus shifts to those hands and their tendons, heartbeat thudding in both wrists, looks at his hands before snatching them right back to his sides. He always feels rotten to hear the crying start after that, but he’s already on the other side of the bedroom door and doesn’t ever turn back. 

So he doesn’t do that much anymore. Now he just sits. In his armchair. His favorite chair. Just last week he’d been there, slumped back behind an outdated magazine from the stack he’s been meaning to get to, on that glossy stack resting the black circle ashtray he tapped his Maverick Red into. His nose poked up over the magazine at the sound of footsteps, light ones, ones that belonged to Stimpy on his pass through the living room with the scruff of their baby’s neck tucked in his mouth. 

(Ren might’ve gripped the magazine and shot his tongue out stiff, shouted something like, “What the hell do you think you’re _doing_ , man?!”, but he can’t be sure how exactly things went that day).

On this day, though, he recalls it because it’s happening, he’s sitting here in his chair _now_ watching his boyfriend (still need to get to town hall, _fuck-)_ walk over toward him _now,_ and Ren is certainly in the moment when Stimpy leans forward and tries to lay a baby in his lap.

Never so quickly has he sat upright, thrown his arms over his head just to busy them. “Whoa, whoa.” Low sits his brow, fixing a taut grind of his back teeth. “What’s going on here?”

“Just hold him,” Stimpy says, and his voice is just as candy floss as usual, and he’s smiling, never stops. “I have to go start dinner.”

Ren eyes skeptically the warm little pile of puppy in a teddy bear print onesie. His nose sniffs lightly, hardly means it. “Can’t you toss him in the bassinet?”

“He needs to be nurtured, Ren,” Stimpy tells him, takes advantage of Ren’s arms the second they relax to lay the baby within them. “See now, isn’t that _sweet?”_

He hardly thinks he’s ever felt so stiff. His arms, they’re wet concrete, his back a lightning pole, and though he fears they’ll burn up on the spot, he fits those unjust hands of his right up against his son’s impossibly silken fur. 

When he looks up again, Stimpy is gone. When he looks down again, big wet eyes are staring back, teeny tiny little baby ears that perk up at the sound of his voice.

“Heh...hee- _hee…”_ A single knuckle offers down to stroke him at the fat of his cheek. “Hi, Ricky… You probably don’t know who I am, but I...I _love_ you.” Ren blinks. Ren feels his lip curl up in a smile of pointed teeth and thrumming heart. “Green eyes. That’s very wonderful. Just like your Dad.”

In a pocket of his mind, once he picks the lint and pebbles out, he can remember the first time he’d been here. Two months ago. He wouldn’t like to admit how many layers he’d sweat through in the delivery room, a metronome from aching fear to gnawing anxiety for _nine fucking hours_ , every few minutes manifesting as a grip of red hot anger for knowing no other release. In that, something like _excitement_ hadn’t the space to slip in, not until he’d ungripped the yank on his ears to watch his very first son take his very first breath. The first time he’d held his child, he felt much the same as all the times proceeding, though might say far less panicstricken. Awe had been too perfervid at the forefront. Amazement to look down into his very own arms and watch his baby breathe. That’s just about the first moment in his life he’d thought, _oh, Jesus, to hell with money, it’s worth it, it’s all worth this._

For a while, he’d thought only of his unborn child as an heir, though having the freshest Höek placed in his arms like that, _that’s_ when he became his baby, his very own heart torn out and pieced together into his spitting image. 

(Yes, his son’s a Höek all right, from the creamy beige coat to the razor edge of his teeth. His very own name passed down to his very own child. And something makes him wonder for the hundredth time how his mother transferred her howls of excitement to hear the news over the phone into a coherent fact for his father- _Ren’s having a baby, he just called me, it’s-it’s incredible!_ The conversation probably lost its prom date after that. Ren can piece together that much from the phone call he’d ignored just after Mass let out the same day).

He’s much more accustomed to holding a baby after some practice. He does it all at once when the kitchen stove reads a bleary two:something in the morning, pajama pants bunched up around his feet that freeze gainst the tile; holds him, right up safe against his chest, fills the room with the light of the refrigerator and clatters a hand around inside until it grips a bottle. There’s nothing in baby books about hipchecking the fridge door shut and ignoring the dull shatter within, nothing about bouncing a fussy two month old with one hand and stuffing the rubber bottle nipple in his mouth with the other. His own mouth.

“Uh-huh, just a second,” Ren muffles to the chords of whining. The bottle nipple pulls from his teeth, a finger tapping to test its warmth, and, deemed well enough, transfers to the warbling mouth of its rightful owner. All the baby books in the world won’t give up the secret that kids only care about how warm the nipple is. Not the formula. He’d had to burn his hands on enough microwaved glass bottles, the whole _HA- HOT HOT HOT_ toss it back and forth all the way to the counter ordeal before realizing he’s a goddamn genius. 

Ren holds his baby in the kitchen, feeds him til he’s quiet. At some point, he notices the fridge magnet leaving a pressure tattoo on his arm where he leans against it, which is very close to when the feeling of fingers tugging at his chest cajoles him to glance down. A little quirk pulls his top lip up. He doesn’t mean to _sneer_ at an infant, but it’s something like his natural canine instinct to animadvert against such cat-like behaviors as kneading at the fur of his father’s chest as he eats. 

“Hey, cut that out,” Ren demands in nothing above a whisper. Had he a free hand, he’d bat away the little paws that pull at him. But there’s null he can do now but take it. An exhale tips his head backward to rest against the freezer door, and his eyes close, and the clock ticks further and further from midnight.

Ricky’s six months old on his hip another afternoon, tucked up against the broadcloth of his cheap white collared shirt undone at the top four buttons, tie loosened round his shoulders with it. The couture of a deadbeat who’d slapped on some aftershave and found another factory job to keep up with the demands of a baby growing out of his clothes by the week now. He’s just gotten home from an overnight shift when the briefcase in his arms is traded for the weight of a baby, and Stimpy’s at least kind enough to kiss his cheek before slipping out the front door. Ren looks to his reflection in two green eyes, and sighs.

That afternoon, Ren shifts Ricky up on a hip and pets his cheek with one curled knuckle, and that’s all it takes to light the fuse on a tart lungful of wailing.

“Ah, fuck,” he bites, quick to jerk his hand away and replace it under Ricky’s arm. “I forgot about the teething thing.”

His mind, though wobbling around loosely in his skull, is focused from there, points him smartly toward the freezer. He lifts Ricky up to lay at his chest, places a hand to support his tail-less behind and recoils it back soaking wet. He hardly earns the chance to cough his disgust out before the kitchen landline is ringing off its hook.

“Yes? What is it?” he snaps once he picks up the call, only after the dash to the bedroom for an armload of changing supplies he drops noisily to the counter. Ren blinks and straightens when the voice on the other end of the line really catches what attention he can spare. “Oh. Mom. Eh... _hello_.”

The receiver tucks into a shoulder, frees both hands to lift Ricky underneath the arms and hold him away from his chest. He glances between the counters where they prepare their food and the table where they eat it, lip curling up in repulsion enough to quicken his pulse til he’s distracted by the new bout of crying that reminds him to strain against the phone cord and yank the freezer door open. Ricky is laid on his back to the counter beside the sink, box fan purring in the nearest window, frozen little chewbone tucked in his aching gums.

“Yeah, everything’s fine around here,” Ren says into the phone. A hand keeps a hold on Ricky’s ankles while the other clicks on the front burner of the gas range, cigarette pulled from pocket to mouth to light the tip among the flames. “ _Mhm, mhm,”_ he’s mumbling with his mouth busy on the menthol, inhales a deep drag, stands up straight and blows it far behind him all in one quick stride. “He’s doing great. Much bigger than the last time you saw him. You know us Höek men have bones of steel.”

He keeps the lit end of the smoke out of the vicinity of every last precious strand of baby fur, pinched in two fingers as he sets to work untaping the sickeningly wet diaper. Ren feels his toes tighten. Ren feels his neck begin to sweat.

(This is the part he hates perhaps the very most about parenting. Maybe hates it less than the violent intrusive thoughts of _chance_ and tragedy. Maybe hates it more than all else. Maybe wouldn’t hate it so much if it weren’t so _filthy_ , if _filthy_ weren’t so dastardly a thing to be in his eyes, and he isn’t so sure why the thought of germs crawling up his hands makes his panic gland throb as hotly as it does, maybe something to do with sin being filth and filth being sin, even something as simple as soda cans by his bedside or a streak on the China closet, the Reverend Höek ran a tight ship, uh-huh, he sure did, so maybe Ren yearns to bash his own head into the drywall when he feels unclean because he’s spent so much of his life feeling so so so very unclean, maybe).

“No, we don’t have any plans yet. It’s June,” he thinks he says when his mother asks about Christmas, distracted more than he’d care to be in dragging a wet wipe up his son’s naked bits. Ren noticed about three months into knowing Ricky that the claws on his feet are retractable, done so with the disdain of being too _poor_ to revel in the luxuries of this great new technological millennium and look up just what the fuck a crossbreed between an asthma-hound Chihuahua and a fat stupid cat is meant to look like; the two little feet in his face as he hunches over the counter and changes his son have all their claws on display today, just missing a nick on his cheek every other second. A clump of used wipes slaps harshly into the kitchen trash. Ren drags off his cigarette for a long heaving moment before realizing how close his hand is to touching his face, and the smoke is whipped promptly to smolder out in the damp basin of the sink. “Uh-huh, sure- wait, what did you say? ...No. no way, I am _not_ interested in spending my holiday with that stupid- I don’t _care_ if it’d be his first Christmas with his grandson, how about he starts by caring about his _actual_ son?”

Ricky fusses on the countertop. Ren slides a clean diaper underneath him, but gets no farther before he’s gripping the phone up fully in a hand. The fan blows against the stale summer sweat of his face. 

“Absolutely no. A thousand times no. I’ve had to put up with enough bullshit from him my entire life, the least I can do is keep _my_ kid away from that crap. You- What? _I’m_ selfish?! Do you have any idea how screwed up I turned out because of him?!” He lifts his free hand to fumble with the adhesives of the new diaper when Ricky starts to shrill out another cry. Tape sticks to his hand, to itself. Ren flags his wrist in time to his jaw clenching white. “No, Mom, it’s not irrational! I wish he never changed! That morning he woke up in the stupid church parking lot after drinking all night- that wasn’t a miracle! That wasn’t an omen! I wish he _had_ gone off shitfaced and crashed his fucking car and _died!”_

The baby wails on the countertop, louder when the landline slams back on its hook. All the fur lifts on the back of Ren’s neck, all his knuckles go white and veins go pulsing, and the fist he slams on the fake marble of the counter surges pain all the way up his arthritic wrist. 

“Why won’t you be _quiet?!”_ is among the first time he finds his voice in the last half a year. “I wanna cry, too! Do I get to cry? _Please,_ dear _God,_ make it _stop!”_

Life is nothing but ringing in his ears until he swallows, lifts his forehead the same way one might be pulled from water to look into the wet green eyes of his screaming baby, listen to the rusty spin of the box fan, and with so honed his hunter’s hearing can even he detect the faint sizzle of the cigarette kissing a single slide of sink water. Ren swallows. A hitching gasp sears its way up his throat.

He gathers Ricky up his arms and presses him to his chest, holds a palm to the back of his head, cradles him rocks him hushes him in the kitchen, but it's useless, he’s _crying,_ couldn’t stop if he were bribed to, but that’s just as well- Ricky’s crying, too.

It’s after sunset when Stimpy comes home again. The baby’s been asleep something like thirteen minutes, teething toy melted down to liquid in the crib beside him. There’s another fan in the bedroom they all share, and it circulates the cooled evening air inside to mix with the damp, angled toward the end of the bed where it blows so gently through silent crib bars. Ren, for dinner, has a shower and a smoke, still working on the latter as he sits up against the headboard, legs outstretched, eyes half-lidded but never quite closing whilst he stares at the torn up paper of the farthest bedroom wall. He drags the cigarette for as long as it takes to blink once. He sips delicately off the beer bottle in his other hand for as long as it takes to taste it.

“Hi, honey,” lifts his ears up an inch or two, draws his gaze to where Stimpy walks forward and smiles at him. That gleaming grin is shared in a glance toward their sleeping bundle of oh, joy. “Did you two have a nice day together?”

Ren sucks a centimeter off his cigarette and taps the ashes into the neck of the beer bottle. A broad breath fills his shoulders. “Don’t leave me alone with Ricky anymore. I can’t handle it.” 

Stimpy pokes his tongue through the middle of his frowning kitty mouth. “Oh, Ren, it’s not so hard. He’s still too little to misbehave like his Daddy yet.”

“It’s not him,” he grunts, cigarette lifted to his lips again but not yet touching. “It’s me. _I’m_ the idiot.”

The tip smolders orange in the dulled evening dark. Ren can _feel_ the eyes on him, burning him blackened, yet can offer no more than a _plunk_ of the half smoked cigarette into the rest of his beer, slugging a final sip off it before losing the bottle to the nightstand. He lays to the mattress with a wrist slung over tired, stinging eyelids.

“Hey, Ren…” Weight creaks the empty side of the bed til it’s empty no more. Stimpy rests a hand on Ren’s heartbeat. “I...I don’t want you to think you’re bad at being a parent. Baby stuff is hard. I just have more practice.”

Ren relieves one eye just to squint at him, mouth critical. “What practice do _you_ have with raising a kid?”

The grin he gets back is tight enough to thin both Stimpy’s eyes. “I get you to brush your teeth once a month now, don’t I?”

“Don’t patronize me. I’ve had enough of that in my life.” Hands rest to Ren’s abdomen. He huffs. “If anyone’s the goddamn baby here, anyway, it’s you. I haven’t seen you eat a vegetable since 1997.”

“But _neither_ of us are babies, Ren.” Pink eyes peel open at the feeling of his face being grabbed up, cheeks squished in Stimpy’s palms as his focus is directed toward the crib situated at the foot of their bed. “ _That’s_ a baby. Isn’t it great? Isn’t it- isn’t it everything you’ve ever _dreamed_ of?”

Yes, he must admit, yes, it’s _breathtaking_ on occasion to look down and remember he’d gone together with the love of his life and created a little living creature like that, _Christ._ But then the guilt starts to feast on his insides. It bites through his small intestine and chews up his optic nerves. Today, it’s worse. Today he looks down at Ricky and sees himself, and that scares him in the same way the mirror does. 

“I’m not cut out for this,” Ren moans, hides his face in both hands, but they lift quickly off to rant in gestures as he talks. “All I’ve ever wanted is a little filial adoration. But what do I do to deserve that? Go on and do the same things that made _my_ childhood miserable? There’s something _wrong_ with me, Stimpy, something maybe I should have figured out before knocking you up.”

The hand on his heart refuses to move. Ren lets it stay, because he’s too busy anyway, coiled up wondering where on the map he’d cut the wrong turn. Was it drinking? Blow? Chronic instability, insomnia, an ill lust for power- what the hell’s he listing anymore? Sometimes he sits awake at night and compares the feeling of backhanding his only companion to the feeling of being seven years old watching his parents act the blueprint. But he doesn’t hit Stimpy to control him- _that’s_ his father, no hesitation to leave a handprint on the mouth that questioned his values. He hits Stimpy because he’s a goddamned fucking radioactive son of a bitch and he’s going straight to Hell for more reasons than Iscariot, but he’ll be damned twice over if his son is sitting on the living room floor in seven years clicking together a little yellow Lego house just to make believe he lives inside it. Ren isn’t going to let his son fear a lifted hand the way he does. Nobody’s touching his baby and leaving with their innards still inside.

“It’s okay to doubt yourself,” Stimpy reminds him so suddenly it cracks a joint in his neck. “But there’s nothing to be scared of. You’re a great father, better than anybody else in the whole world.”

“D’you,” Ren sniffs, “Do you really think so..?” His gaze straightens out again, watches their son breathe a while and nothing more. A hand of his own lifts to rest on the one at his chest. “What if he gets old and starts to _hate_ me?”

“Then we’ll buy him gummy bears.”

Ren’s sigh is a fondly perturbed one. “What if we mess up raising him, and he turns out to be a serial killer, or a- a foul mouthed chain smoker?”

“ _Daaah,_ then we will love him en-ee-way,” Stimpy robotically chirps, drool wet across his smiling bottom lip. 

A pout pulls on his mouth, but he’s much faster to take on a nonchalant, eyes closed, shrug. “Well, the least you could do is potty train him. If I have to touch one more stinky diaper, my whole body is gonna implode.”

“Not to worry, Ren,” Stimpy salutes. “Little Ricky’ll be in line for the litter box before you know it.”

“Sure, whatever,” Ren snaps back, and like the little prissy dog he is turns on his side just to clutch Stimpy up in all his paws. “Shut up and cuddle me.”

Not a second wasted, arms fling up to wrap him so inordinately tight he finally feels like he’s in one piece again. Not a second wasted.

The very same night it’s past nine when Stimpy’s still in the bathroom obsessing over every last cleanly inch of himself. Ren stands over the crib, looks down, watches, wonders. When must he speak, he does so under his breath enough that he at points even loses it.

“I don’t know who I’m talking to,” he says as he kneels at the bedside. “But...if you could just give us some of your blessings, or whatever crap you have to offer me, that would be nice.” His gaze flicks to the baby, closes again. “I really do like my family. Don’t let anything happen to us, or I’ll kill you.” Another blink, a deep breath in with the moonlight on his back. “If you _do_ care enough to keep us safe, then...I’ll hold off on the pectorals and all the fixing my mental health stuff til later. Okay. See ya around. Amen.”

It feels dirtier than he’d imagined to stand up off his knees and crawl into bed, but that only means the proverbial blow job he’s just administered to God was a toe curling one, so he must be an _archangel_ now. The blankets tug over him and only move when he’s joined in bed. Stimpy kneads at his pillowcase, kisses Ren on the mouth and purrs himself to sleep like he does every other night. Ren thinks he might even follow suit this time. His eyelids drag in laborious blinks to stay awake, darkness welcoming more than chasing, the warm marigold of his lover right there with him. Ren could sleep tonight. Ren might finally breathe.

There’s an audible shatter when his eyes flash open at the caterwaul of crying come from the bed’s end.

Just a lick awake, Stimpy puts a snore on hold to reach a limp hand out and nudge Ren in the shoulder. “Mf.. Your turn.”

He flings his pillow at Stimpy’s face when he’s getting up, but that doesn’t make him a bad person, just an honest one. 


End file.
